Word: prose
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Analyzing the qualities of well-written prose, Tuchman stressed clarity, a scrupulous regard for facts, and a feeling for the "sound of words." She said that the well-turned phrase was the secret of the writer's immortality...
What accounts for the charges? As best I can make out from The Crimson, Suze used a student essay containing the phrase "nigger maid" as a prose model. Also, she required that her students read the essay by X.J. Kennedy entitled "Who Killed King Kong?", in which Kennedy sees Kong as "a black superman figure." I do not have access to the first essay cited, the student essay, but I have read Kennedy's piece, and I gladly tell of it: it comprises twelve paragraphs, only one of which, the second to last, deals with black response to King Kong...
...Wind to Shake the World is neither great literature nor incisive social commentary. Allen is a journalist, not a novelist, and his style makes this obvious. His prose moves fitfully at best, is downright turgid at worst, and is obviously better suited to the front page of a New England town newspaper than the inside of a classy $10 hard-back. Always the reporter, he is long on detail and short on interpretation. An endless stream of names, places, death tolls and other gruesome details flashes past, making the book itself a hurricane of facts that often leaves the reader...
Throughout the book, Barry incorporates excerpts from Sand's own extensive autobiographic works and correspondence, without disrupting the flow of his own prose. Although the most memorable phrases in the book are Sand's, Barry too is highly readable. He deals with the potentially trite, unhappy childhood syndrome with just a dash of sentimental emotionalism, making the reader aware of the conflicts and complexes which shaped Sand without turning her life into a soapy saga...
...both books more or less concurrently is a highly satisfactory introduction to Cavafy's life and work. And, by juxtaposing the two studies, one is relieved of Liddell's occasionally tedious scholarly circumspection. Both authors write clearly, although Keeley gets the laurels (as Cavafy would put it) for flowing prose and consummate organization. And, for the non-Greek speaker who has lamented the dearth of any form of scholarship on one of Greece's foremost literary figures, the appearance this fall of both works is gratifying...